In native mobile touch application developments such as those for iPhone and Android devices, user interface (UI) software development kits (SDKs) have been developed to give users the ability to pull down to refresh or reload a view of a page on mobile devices using their fingers and/or styluses. Mobile device users are used to native mobile applications having this pull-down-to-refresh functionality. However, this pull-down-to-refresh functionality does not exist in desktop applications, web-based applications, and mobile applications that are not written in the native code.
Applications that are not written in native mobile touch application developments may implement certain traditional approaches to displaying content on a mobile device. These traditional approaches have their drawbacks. For example, to manage a view pull, one traditional approach involves “hijacking” the natural scrolling behavior of the entire content area and making the process of scrolling manual. Traditional approaches like this can be very intrusive to the process of scrolling itself and expensive for central processing unit (CPU) cycle reasons, particularly since there is already a natural browser mechanism to control how content is refreshed.
Other traditional approaches do not work well in a “dynamic page” environment. With such traditional approaches, all of the JavaScript and HyperText Markup Language (HTML) of an application are loaded upfront. When there is a need to go to another section of the application, a state is changed to show or hide content. The application does not perform another page load or refresh content. Yet other traditional approaches to displaying content on a mobile device are not hospitable to “app-like” designs.
In view of the foregoing, there is room for innovations and improvements to displaying content on user devices.